Friday, January 18, 2013

GOP plan: If you can't win, cheat

The last two presidential elections showed the Republicans that
their ideas and candidates are having a tough time winning a majority of
the American electorate. The simple solution would be to come up with
better ideas and more palatable candidates. So far, though, their
solution has make it harder for people to vote with phony scare tactics
about voter fraud and gerrymandering districts, sometimes house by
house, so that even if the Democrats win the majority of the votes in
the state, the GOP still wins the Congressional district.

The RNC chair is encouraging Republican governors and
legislators -- who, thanks to the "Republican wave" election of 2010, still
control many battleground states that backed Obama and the Democrats in
2012 -- to game the system.

"I think it's something that a lot of states that have been
consistently blue [Democratic in presidential politics] that are fully
controlled red [Republican in the statehouse] ought to be considering," [Reince] Priebus says
with regard to the schemes for distributing electoral votes by district
rather than the traditional awarding of the votes of each state (except
Nebraska and Maine, which have historically used narrowly defined
district plans) to the winner.

Pennsylvania -- the state that has already been to court over its
voter ID law that was supposed to "guarantee the election for Mitt
Romney" -- is thinking about it,
as are several other states like Ohio and Virginia, both of which were
won by Barack Obama in the last two elections. (It goes without saying
that something will be in the works here in Florida. They've got
nothing better to do.)